Captain's Log, U.S.S. Macabann

Tuesday February 11, 2017

Woke up this morning
with a jolt: went flying off my bunk as the ship lurched sharply
to starboard. It takes a lot to pitch an
old sea dog like me out on his ear, so I went topside to take a
decko.

FoundWalkerdead at the helm,
lying across the wheel, his body forcing the wheel hard starboard
into the wind. Two jagged incisor marks
on the left side of his neck explained how he'd died.

Thought at first I'd
have to amputate his right arm to free the wheel, since I could
never liftWalker's one-thirty kilo bulk. But, reluctant to desecrate his poor body any further, I
tried to heft him, and found the corpse only weighed eighty kilos
or so, which I managed to lift with some difficulty.

Looks like I'm the
captain now, so I've taken it upon myself to keep this
log. I notice Walker, Matthews, Anderson,
and the rest in their turn haven't put anything down about the
Other. All they've done is report the
murders in the log as "Smith and Donaldson died last
night. Will be buried at sea today", or
"Peterson dead now, so I've taken over the captaincy and
controlof
this log." No one has wantedtohint at the real
terror that has stalked this ship, for fear of being thought mad,
in the unlikely event of ever reaching port alive.

Well, I'm captain now,
so it's up to me to put into writing what has really happened
aboard the U.S.S. Macabann.
NowWalker's dead, I'm the last living man aboard this
ship, and I know I won't get back to port alive. So I intend to faithfully report what has happened aboard
this vessel over the last seven weeks or so, and you can think me
mad or nor for all I care.

* * *

I'm no helmsman, so I
can't say what our exact longitude and latitude were at the time,
but we were a day or so out ofVanuatu, heading south forNew
Zealand,
when there came a cry of, "Man overboard!"

I was in my cabin at
the time, catching forty winks, so I hurried up onto the main
deck to see if I could help out.

There was a small
raft, barely more than four or five sticks of wood loosely bound
together, floating off the leeward bow.
Walker and Andrews had gaffs on the raft and were holding it firm
off the hull, careful not to step aboard the raft for fear of
capsizing it.

"Need a hand?" I
called down to Mackey.

"Nah, the bastard's
light as a feather," Mackey called back up to me. He easily carried the castaway under one arm, while
scaling the roping.

"How do you reckon he
got out there?" asked Peterson.

"Don't ask me,"
saidWalker. Then to Mackey, "Is
he dead?"

"No, but I don't
reckon he'll last much longer."

"Let's get him to an
empty cabin," I said. "And easy with the
water." Which Peterson was trying to
spoon between the castaway's parched lips. "His stomach won't be able to handle anything much for a
while yet."

"I'd better make my
report to the captain," said Peterson after we'd changed the
castaway out of his rags into some of Winters' spare gear, and
had him settled into a bunk in an unused cabin.

While the others filed
out of the cabin, withWalkermuttering, "He won't last the week out, most
likely," I took a long look at the castaway. I wondered how long he'd been adrift at sea, and what his
chances really were. He was so thin that
his bones showed clearly through his flesh, like the Human
Skeleton at an old-fashioned freak show; pale as chalk and dry as
parchment. Once he had been very
handsome, with pale blond hair and eyes so light blue they almost
seemed white. As it was, when he had been
brought aboard, I'd seen one or two of the crew eyeing his body
with interest.

As I came up onto the
main deck, I overheardWalkerand Janssen arguing:

"Ease up, cookie,"
saidWalker, "we had no choice but to bring him
aboard."

"But supplies are
precious; now we have another mouth to feed."

"How low can they be,
two days out of port?" askedWalker, and I had to agree.

"He'll die in a few
days at most, anyway," insisted Janssen.
"There's nothing we can do for him!"

"Then we'll throw him
back after he's dead," I said, coming up behind
Janssen. I knew that as cook it was
Janssen's job to worry about provisions, but how much food could
the castaway go through in his present state? If he survived and his appetite picked up, we'd be within
sight of theNorth IslandofNew Zealandby then and would be
able to pick up more provisions.

"I still say this is
not good," insisted Janssen heading off toward the
galley.

"How's the passenger?"
asked Captain Douglas as he descended the nine steps from the
helm to the main deck.

"In a bad way,
Captain," I replied. I led the way to the
cabin the castaway occupied.

If there was ever a
sea captain who gave the impression he was doing an impersonation
of Gregory Peck, giving his impersonation of Captain Ahab, it was
Captain Douglas. Not quite as old as
myself, but still as crusty an old sea dog as any I've ever set
eyes upon.

"I'll send Doc Celco
along to have a decko at him," said the captain. "You can work out some sort of roster to keep watches on
him, but try not to let it interfere with your
duties. Don't forget we still have a ship
to run."

* * *

For a night and two
days the castaway lay on his bunk, sleeping fitfully. He was unable to keep down any food and only a very
little water in that time. But Doc Celco
gave him a number of vitamin shots which seemed to be doing the
trick.

It was just
aftermidnight, on the second night, when he regained
consciousness.

"You're awake at
last," I said by way of greeting, crossing through the portal to
the middle deck and into his cabin, having heard the castaway
talking to himself.

"Yes, I...How did I
get here?" he asked, struggling feebly to raise himself to a
sitting position in his bunk.

"We found you at sea,"
I replied, helping him to sit up, "adrift on a raft."

"The raft...Yes," he
said. Then he spotted the full moon
through an uncovered porthole. The orange
globe held his gaze for a few moments, then slowly his pale blue
eyes roamed the room, taking in the gunmetal wardrobe,
three-legged stool and small cane table, that along with the bed
were the cabin's only furnishings. At
last he looked back toward me and said, "It took me two months to
build the raft."

"Then you were
shipwrecked?" I asked, stating the obvious, since few fools set
out to sea aboard a rickety float of logs bound together with mud
and twine otherwise.

"No. He...marooned me there," he said.

"You were stranded
deliberately?" I asked, horrified by the suggestion.

"Yes." The word was barely audible, yet the impact was
explosive.

The castaway was too
weak to talk any longer, so I left him to rest, with the offer of
food and water, but he shook his head.

"But you've got to
eat," I protested.

"I don't need the kind
of food you can offer me," he said.

"You'll die if you
don't eat," I advised him.

He laughed strangely,
then said, "Death can't harm me now."

* * *

"What did he mean, he
was marooned?" askedWalkerback in the captain's cabin, where I'd gone to
report the conversation.

"He might have been
waylaid by pirates," suggested Davies, the First Mate.

"Pirates? In the late 1990s?" askedWalker, incredulous.

"Sure," insisted
Davies. "Pirates have roamed the seas
aroundSingaporeandPapua New Guineasince before the Second World
War. Preying on boat-people
mainly. They must have waylaid hundreds
of vessels over the last sixty years or so. Of course it's unusual for them to stray this far south,
but with the state he was in when we picked him up, he might well
have drifted all the way here from New Guinea.

"FromNew
Guinea, to
nearVanuatu? Use your head man!"
said Captain Douglas.

* * *

Borg, as the castaway
called himself -- "Just Borg!" -- slept all through the next day,
and was still refusing all food and drink when I came onto watch
the following night.

I found him sitting up
in bed, poring through an assortment of old newspapers and
magazines.

"You really orta eat
something, you know," I said, pointing toward the tray of food
that remained untouched on the cane table beside his
bed.

"That's not what I
need," he said.

Lifting the
three-legged stool over to his beside, I sat watching him for a
few seconds, amazed at how much he seemed to have recuperated in
the last twenty-four hours. He was poring
through the death notices, as though determined to catch up on
the news of any bereavements during the time he'd been
stranded.

"You said you were
deliberately marooned," I said.

Borg looked up at me
with his white-blue eyes, clearly startled, uncomprehending, so I
explained, "When we talked last night."

"Did I say that?" he
asked, obviously regretting having spoken of it.

"Yes, you did," I said
firmly.

"I...I must have been
delirious," insisted Borg, returning to his magazine.

I saw that he had
marked various items of interest with a felt-tip pen. The first few were simple obituaries, but two of
them were reports of a series of brutal murders that had
plaguedVanuatufor months. I
remembered the murders well; there had been nine of
them. In each case the victim had been a
teenage girl who had her throat slashed and her blood drained
off. Though the killer had never been
caught, the murders had stopped suddenly a few weeks before our
ship berthed at the island. The entire
population ofVanuatuhad been on edge throughout our brief stay,
obviously still very wary of strangers and we had all been glad
to leave.

We spoke for a few
minutes more, but Borg was obviously more interested in his
clippings than in talking, so I bid him goodbye and returned to
the upper deck.

"How's the patient?"
askedWalkeras I came up on deck.

"He seems preoccupied
with death," I said and toldWalkerwhat I had observed.

* * *

The murders began the
next night. Thomas was the first
victim. Steviers found his body the next
morning, in the cabin they shared.

"I don't understand
it," wailed Steviers, "murdered right under my nose, while I
slept. Normally I'm a light sleeper, but
last night I slept like a log. Almost as
though I'd been drugged or something."

As soon as I heard the
description of the corpse (throat cut, every drop of blood
drained from the body), I regretted talking toWalkerabout what I'd seen in
Borg's cabin. I suppose it was only
natural that the crew would suspect Borg, an outsider, rather
than admit that one of their own could be the killer. Although it was clearly ridiculous to think he was
capable of killing anyone in his present state.

"Who else could it
be?" demandedWalker, as a dozen of us sat or stood around in the
captain's cabin discussing the murder.

"There are more than a
hundred men aboard this ship," pointed out Captain
Douglas.

"Most of whom have
sailed together for years," said Mackey.
"There's no way any of us could be the killer, without anyone
else at least suspecting something."

"And what do we really
know about this man Borg?" askedWalker. Then
answered his own question, "Nothing! We
don't know a damn thing about him!"

"Borg isn't the only
newcomer aboard this ship," I pointed out. "We picked up Maxwell just before leavingPortland, Taki inYokohama, and Janssen less than a week ago
inPortofDarwin. What do we really
know about any of them for that matter?"

"What gives you the
right to single us out as suspects?" demanded Maxwell angrily,
standing up from his chair.

"Calm down!" warned
the captain, placing a restraining hand on Maxwell's left
shoulder. "No one is going to single out
any suspects just yet. What I propose, is
that we form a delegation to confront this man Borg. A small delegation, of half a dozen or
so!"

As it was there were
eight of us in the delegation: Captain Douglas, First Mate
Davies, Second Mate Peterson, Dr. Celco, Walker, Mackey, Steviers
and myself.

"The first thing we
want you to understand," said Captain Douglas, as we all crowded
into Borg's small cabins "is that no one is accusing you of
anything."

"Yes we bloody well
are!" contradictedWalker. "I say he's the
murderer, and we orta slap him into irons
immediately!"

"Or better yet, string
him up!" suggested Steviers.

"Neither of you two is
the captain of this ship!" reminded Captain Douglas
pointedly. "And until you are, keep your
suggestions to yourself!"

"I...I'm afraid I
don't understand," said Borg, obviously very frightened of Walker
and Steviers.

"Don't play dumb with
us!" saidWalker. "There's been a
brutal murder aboard ship. As if you
didn't know that already."

"But why should you
suspect me?" asked Borg.

"Because you're the
one with the death fixation," replied Steviers, "and you're the
only one on board we can't vouch for."

"Surely the doctor can
vouch for me," he said. Turning to face
Doc Celco, "Is there anyway that I could have left this bed to
commit the murder?"

"No, of course not!"
responded Celco rounding on Walker and Steviers. "This man is still too weak to even walk, let alone
butcher a big man like Bertrand Thomas!"

However, they refused
to be placated, so we continued to stand round the bed of poor
Borg. Finally, realising we had no
intention of leaving yet, Borg asked, "How...how did your crewman
die?"

We told him and Borg
said, "So it was the Other. He's here; my
senses were right all along!"

"The Other?" asked the
captain. Then, when Borg seemed reluctant
to say anything more, "If there's anything at all you can say
that would draw suspicion away from yourself, I'd earnestly
advise you to tell us immediately."

He looked toward me
and I nodded my agreement, so, after a moment's hesitation, Borg
said, "The Other is my creator...."

"Your creator."
askedWalker. "What the hell are
you, some kind of robot?"

"No," said Borg very
quietly, "I am a vampire."

"A vampire?" said
Steviers. Then to the captain, "He's
either mad, or else he wants us all to think he is."

"No, no," said Walker,
"that would explain how he's managed to survive for so long, even
grow stronger, without eating or drinking anything."

"And it would also
explain the condition of Thomas' corpse," added
Mackey. "Since vampires live off human
blood!"

"No, no," protested
Borg, "I didn't kill your crewman. I
admit that I have gained strength by drawing energy from members
of your crew. But only ever a small
amount from any individual. Never enough
to harm anyone." He paused to scan the
semicircle of faces around his bunk, then said, "I could never
survive that way, by drinking human blood...Not
anymore."

"But you have in the
past?" asked Doc Celco.

"Yes, but only
reluctantly. I never asked to be given
the so-called gift of eternal life. It
was thrust upon me," said Borg. He paused
to scan the mainly hostile faces again, then continued, "It was
nearly five years ago that we first heard that nearly two hundred
men had died in a mining disaster inOrebro.

"It was six months
later that the rumours first reachedStockholm...."

"The rumours?" asked
Cpt. Douglas.

"That the dead miners
had returned from the grave as nosferatu: vampires. Of course, no one took the rumours seriously, at
first. We naturally assumed that they
were the result of the mass grief, understandably caused by the
sudden deaths of so many men at the same time.

"It was about ten
weeks after theOrebromining disaster when I learnt the horrible
truth behind the rumours. I was on my way
home from the theatre late one night, when from out of the
shadows a pair of deathly pale hands reached out to grab me and
draw me in. The man was about forty, my
own height, and very muscular. At first I
thought that he was a mugger. Then, as he
held my body hard up against his own in the shadows, and began to
move his face toward mine, I mistook him for a homosexual rapist
and struggled even harder to escape his grasp. However, as I felt the first prick of his teeth against
my neck, at last I knew the truth.

"In my last moments of
human existence, I hoped and prayed that the Other would drain my
last drop of blood, leaving me a hollow, lifeless
husk. However, the vampire was too
careful for that: he left just enough blood in my veins to ensure
that I would return from the dead as a vampire.For the next three days he nursed
me through the throes of human death and vampire
rebirth. At first I fought my new
existence, tried to starve myself back to death, by refusing to
consume any blood. However, the pain of a
vampire's starvation is many times greater, many times more
agonising than that a human being faces.
So, reluctantly I took lives, always keeping to the very old,
terminally ill, or criminals. Never
young, healthy people who would lose too much through
death. Then after awhile I found that I
could survive by drinking the blood of animals, or even by
drawing energy away from people, little enough from each of them
so that no one was ever killed...."

Again Borg paused to
gauge our reaction to his tale, then after a moment he continued,
"I couldn't understand at first how the Other could bring himself
to make me a vampire. When a vampire
takes a life, it can kill its victim outright, or else make him
undead. With the misery of my own plight,
whenever I had killed for blood, in the beginning, I had always
been careful to drain off every last drop of my victims' blood,
to spare them the misery of returning from the dead. Yet my creator had willingly inflicted his own
plight upon me. Then as I roamed the
streets ofStockholm,Uppsala, Vasteräs, andOrebronight after night with him, the
answer slowly dawned upon me: whatever else the Other's death had
done to him (however it had managed to turn him into a vampire),
it had certainly damaged his brain. In
death he had become insane. Not merely
content to survive off human blood, he intended to inflict as
much misery as possible upon the human race, to create a race of
killer vampires, which would eventually annihilate the human
race!"

"But where the hell
would that get him?" demandedWalker. "How could he
survive after he had made the human race extinct?"

"Yes," agreed
Steviers, "doesn't he need us for his food?"

"Not necessarily, he
could survive off the blood of animals for hundreds of years
before running out of food," explained Borg.

"But sooner or later
he'd be eating the hand that feeds him!", insistedWalker.

"Yes," agreed Borg,
"but by that time even he would be ready for death. Eternal life is a human dream: even mad vampires
don't crave an eternity of misery, of damnation. By the time his death occurred, he would be eager for
it. And by that time he would have made
the Earth barren of life." He sighed
deeply, then continued, "I confronted the Other with my fears,
expecting at least a half-hearted denial.
But he was only too willing to admit it.
I can still recall the insane sound of his voice as he said,
"Come on friend Borg, we owe nothing to humanity. We are outriders, the next generation, ready to move in
to replace the old. Like Cro-Magnon Man
obliterating the older, inferior Neanderthal Man." For weeks I argued with him, trying to force him to see
reason. But he was insane and
irreversibly bent on his course. So I
knew what I had to do: I had to kill the Other, to save the human
race."

"Why would you put
yourself out for us?" demanded Mackey.

"Because I was once like you, and still have
affection for my old kind. Also, I knew
that the Other was only fantasising. The
Wampyre, as he called them, could never replace humanity as the
dominant species on the planet, because we are too dependent upon
you for our own survival," explained Borg. "So I was determined to kill my creator. However, he shoved all the cunning of the human insane,
by knowing as soon as he could no longer trust me. One night we were together in Västervik, the next night
I heard that he was in Kronoberg. When I
reached Kronoberg, he had crossed the Sound from Sweden to Denmark.. By the time I reached Denmark, he was in Hamburg. I chased him down across
Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, India, then across to
Singapore.
All the while I was getting closer, all the while I was closing
in on him. But I was the hunted, not the
hunter, and after luring me halfway across the globe, he sprang
his trap and stranded me on a deserted island midway between New
Guinea and Vanuatu...."

"But there are no
islands midway betweenNew GuineaandVanuatu!" protestedWalker, articulating the thoughts of
everybody in the cabin.

"There shouldn't be,"
agreed Borg, "however, the Other has the power to control the
elements...."

"And he conjured up an
island in the middle of the ocean?" askedWalker.

"I know how hard it
must be for you to believe," said Borg, "but that is exactly what
he must have done, because somehow he managed to strand me upon
an island where no island should exist.
It took me two months to build a raft, and I floated at sea for
six days and nights before you picked me up."

"Only six days?" asked
Doc Celco. "By the state of you when we
picked you up, I would have imagined closer to
sixteen?"

"Six days of
relentless sun can do dreadful things to a man," explained Borg,
"but infinitely more dreadful things to a vampire. We don't dissolve in the sun's first rays a
la the old horror films, but we lose all of our supernatural
powers, and dehydrate infinitely faster than humans
do."

"But what makes you
think you could still find your creator after all this time?" I
asked. "If it's been more than nine weeks
since he stranded you, he could be almost anywhere on Earth by
now."

"But he isn't," said
Borg, piercing me with his pale blue-white eyes. "He's aboard this vessel."

There was a stunned
silence for a moment, before all hell broke loose as the
delegation broke down into a screaming mob. It took the captain the better part of two minutes to
restore order, but eventually he was able to ask Borg, "How do
you know that?"

"Because I have sensed
his presence ever since being brought aboard. Vampires have a kind of inbuilt radar, a sixth sense,
which enables us to track each other.
Which is how I had chased the Other acrossEuropeandAsia, and how I knew he was aboard
this ship. Even before I regained
consciousness."

We considered Borg's
words for a few moments, then Peterson said, "He's just trying to
scare us all, to buy time for himself!"

"Yes, I say we kill
him...it, right now," insistedWalker. "How can we take his word for
anything? There's only one vampire aboard
this ship, and none of us are safe till we destroy
him!"

Doc Celco, Cpt.
Douglas and myself tried to stop them, as they moved toward
Borg.

But three of them
overpowered us and held us at bay while Peterson and Walker
advanced on Borg. Peterson held him down
on the bunk whileWalkersmashed the three-legged stool on the deck,
sharpened one of the stool's legs into a stake with a pocket
knife, then used the base of the stool as a mallet to hammer the
stake through Borg's heart.

Someone once said,
"This is how the world will end: not with a bang, but a
whimper.'' That's how Borg died: there
was no ear shattering vampire's death roar as in the movies, only
a gasping sigh, almost a hiccup of death.

"Well that's the end
of our troubles," saidWalkerconfidently, throwing down the base of the
stool in nervous excitement.

I hadn't thought that
it could be possible to be a paler shade of white than Borg had
been. Yet his final death seemed to
bleach him to a near-translucent white.

Before our eyes the
vampire's corpse began to flake apart. A
strange wind blew in through a porthole, which I could have sworn
had been closed when we entered the cabin, and out through the
porthole fluttered the crumbling flakes, taking with them all
trace (bar one) of what had gone before.

Up on the main deck
Peterson and Walker were heartily patting each other on the back,
congratulating themselves on a job well done, knowing that they
couldn't be punished for their actions which had been vindicated
by the strange way that Borg's corpse had disintegrated and flown
out through the porthole.

* * *

After Borg's death,
Peterson was the first to die. We found
him next morning in the same state that Thomas' corpse had been
in. After Peterson, Steviers, Andrews and
Alexander all died within the space of two nights.

Desperately we made
forWhangareiHarbouron theNorthIslandofNew Zealand. But inexplicably a
violent storm blew up from nowhere: high seas, followed by
pounding rain, sleet and a strange, dense, London-style pea soup
fog. It was almost as though someone, or
something was controlling the elements, using them against
us.

The day after Steviers
was murdered, our radar and satellite-guidance systems were all
sabotaged. So, blinded at sea, we sailed
around for more than six weeks while the crew were murdered one
or two at a time.

The dead were buried
at sea. At first as the traditional
sailors' burial, then later, when the dead outnumbered the
living, as a precaution against the dead returning to "life" as
vampires.

At the end of six
'weeks there was only Walker, Janssen and myself
left. I couldn't help but appreciate the
irony ofWalkerbeing left till nearly last, almost as though
the Other were rewarding him for the service of murdering poor
Borg.

Now evenWalkeris dead and there are
only two of us left.

When the killing
continued after Borg's murder, we had made a hull-to-hull search
of the ship, in the hope of finding a stowaway to
accuse. But we found no one, so the
vampire must be Janssen!

No wonder the cook had
been so set against rescuing Borg. But in
the end we had been stupid enough to let Janssen off the hook by
murdering Borg, the only one who might have been able to stop
him.

Well I guess my time
is just about up now. The sea is calm at
last, as the storm that has plagued us for six weeks has
mysteriously cleared. The fog is lifting
and I can hear footsteps advancing slowly toward the
helm.

Janssen is outside
hammering on the door now, so it will only be a matter of moments
before I'm dead too. But at least I can
hope that with the death of me, the last sailor aboard ship,
Janssen, a cook, will be unable to pilot the ship back to land
and will die here, safely out at sea. But
wait! What is this? It can't be! Out through the helm
I can see something that terrifies me even more than the monster
that has stalked the Macabann for so long:WhangareiHarbour!